The old sharp voice came on the line and said, Honey, I have been waiting fifty-three years for an Engel to call me about that number. Your Merle was smarter than any lawyer that ever walked into my office.
Ruth was the Ogle County recorder in 1971, ninety-six now, and sharp as a tack. The numbers Merle painted on the back of his corn sign, hidden under white paint in a feed sack in the truck bed, were a recording number. In 1971 Merle placed a permanent agricultural conservation easement on all eighty acres, recorded with the county, protecting that ground for farming in perpetuity.
The hospitals man told me the county had designated a medical development zone and would reassess me as commercial, eight times the taxes, until I sold. But you cannot reassess protected farmland as commercial, and you cannot run a regional campus through an easement recorded before that man was born.
He brought a fruit basket with a bow on it. Merle left me a corn sign with the whole county records office painted on the back of it.
Ruth still had the paperwork in her own files, and she had told her daughter years ago to hold on because someday somebody would come for the Engel place and somebody from the Engel place would need that number. She was right on both counts.
I took the recording number to a lawyer, who pulled the easement, still in force, airtight. The medical development zone can route its front door around eighty acres of protected sweet corn, because that is the one thing the law will not let them pave.
My grandson still parks Merles old Ford on the shoulder of Route 251 every July with the hand-painted sign, CORN, PICKED THIS MORNING. People still drive from Rockford. The back of the sign is painted plain white again now, but I know what is under it.
I kept the fruit basket, too. I gave it to Ruth. At ninety-six she has earned a nice basket of pears, and she earned my farm back for me with one phone call and a memory like a steel trap.